


Headin’ for Greener Pastures

by bluesyturtle



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Episode Related, Friendship, Gen, Hanging Out, Hot Chocolate, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Possibly Pre-Slash, Sherlock Holmes and Bees, Valentine's Day Fluff, Zebras, the female of the species
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-12 22:45:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3358046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and Marcus hang out at the brownstone and look at bees. No, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Headin’ for Greener Pastures

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Valentine’s Day!

Holmes doesn’t answer the door when Marcus comes ringing the bell. Both Kitty and Joan are currently out of the brownstone, so there’s no one sensible around to let him in.

He idles on the front step with his hands shoved into his pockets, blinking against the softest caresses of flurries that float on the breeze and catch in his eyelashes. Holmes texted him about twenty minutes ago saying he wanted to see him, and Marcus, assuming he was being sought out for a low-stakes consultation, dropped his meager dinner of twice-cooked pasta and hightailed it over.

There’d been a lull in cases on both sides since they located the missing _zeh_ -bras and their quagga offspring. If the captain has anything, he’s not sending it Marcus’ way, meaning he’s been sitting on his hands waiting for the clock to run out on his vacation days. A text from anyone requesting his company right now is a godsend, and it probably goes without saying.

Marcus might revise that statement to something more exclusive if prompted, but no one’s looking at him. Holmes isn’t here to glance at him sideways and guess what he had for breakfast that morning. Trick question: Marcus skipped breakfast, but Holmes would have seen that, too.

A dozen more rings and twice as many obnoxiously loud knocks yield no response from the brownstone’s sole inhabitant. Marcus gets the brilliant idea of trying the handle and finds the door obstinately unlocked. Embarrassed, he quietly lets himself in and shuffles a bit on the mat. He shakes the dusting of snow off his hat and closes the door, shrugging out of his coat as he tentatively calls out Holmes’ name.

The place is deserted by all appearances, though it doesn’t look like Holmes left all that long ago if he left at all. Marcus calls out once to test that theory and again receives no response. His footsteps land solidly on the hardwood floor and bounce off the walls in the foyer: a single pair of steps quieting into silence and tapering off into a hollow sort of void. He ventures into the kitchen, curious, and discovers an empty teakettle on the stove, handle just on this side of hot.

Intrigued, Marcus investigates and unwinds the scarf from around his neck. He loops it around his hand at the foot of the stairs and checks his phone for a message or a missed call. That gets him nowhere, so he pockets his phone and climbs the stairs, prepared to do a cursory search of the rooms. There’s no trace of Holmes’ presence at first, but before he can even try the bedrooms, he stops on the top landing. A cool breeze drifts past his face.

Downstairs was relatively warm by contrast, or it had been to Marcus when he stepped in from outside. Standing in the current of a draft from outside without his coat, he’s not so sure.

An opened window could explain it, but he follows the cold to an unobtrusive door left ajar at the end of the hall. Marcus lifts his hand warily to his hip where his holster _isn’t_ , mutters a curse, and approaches the door with the caution of someone advancing upon a ledge that drops off into a chasm.

He tells himself he’s being silly—that he’s just on edge from being cooped up all day today and yesterday, reading too much into a partway opened door. Holmes hadn’t said what he needed or if he needed anything, and Marcus, probably out of a selfish, insane desire to play apprentice one more time, hadn’t even let himself consider that he’d been summoned here for an altogether different reason.

The door leads to a stairwell. Marcus takes them two at a time, stomach dropping in nervous fear now that he has some suspicion about Holmes being up on a roof but no _context_ for why he’d be up there.

Marcus bursts through the topmost door armed, impressively, with his wadded up scarf and an accelerated heart rate for his troubles. Holmes is sitting in a chair turning to look at him, and two things occur to Marcus almost simultaneously: the first is that Holmes is wearing ear muffs even though the weather doesn’t strictly call for them and the second is that he probably looks like a crazy person for barging onto the roof all out of sorts, underdressed for the slight chill in the air.

Holmes stares at him for a count of three, blinks, and says, “Hello, Detective.”

It’s familiar and it calms Marcus down immediately. He can’t really parse through the details of his panic to get to the reason for it. Last time they met in person, Holmes was collected, calm, and sure of himself. He was so confident that he caught and gift-wrapped a murderer in a carefully thought-out orchestration of events while Marcus slept.

He pulls the door shut behind him and slowly peels the scarf away from his hand like thread from a spool. Holmes is squinting at him when he looks up, and while he knows what that nearly blank but perceptibly analytical expression bodes, he doesn’t hesitate to cross the rooftop and join him.

“You’d spared a thought for picking the lock, hadn’t you?”

Marcus isn’t surprised, but he is amazed, somehow. He tries to hide it and probably fails, murmuring impassively, “How do you figure?”

“I heard your exhaustive attempts to rouse my attention at the door. You were quite insistent. It was intensely endearing to track your progression through the brownstone.”

“What, like with echolocation?”

He asks it to be an ass, primarily. Peripherally, he asks it out of a genuine curiosity for the method in the deduction he hesitates to dismiss as madness. He wouldn’t put it past Holmes, not even in the slightest, to have some superhuman ability to track vibrations and irregularities in the air. Really, he wouldn’t—except he’s started to see that humanity is at the heart of what Holmes does.

“Of a sort,” Holmes says, inducing a laugh out of the centermost part of Marcus’ belly.

“I won’t even ask you to explain that.”

“It’s fairly simple. I don’t see why you would need me to.”

That’s what he says, but his tone is light and his expression is carefree. Marcus follows the relaxed angle of his sightline to the apparent beehive that seems to exist quite matter-of-factly on this rooftop.

“So I contemplate breaking into your place, and I get demoted to the official address?” he asks smoothly, wondering if he looks half as composed as Holmes does. “That how this works?”

Holmes makes a noise like he’s considering the question seriously and gestures pointedly to the chair beside his for Marcus to sit. He does so as the explanation comes, delivered evenly yet peppered, as Marcus has come to expect, with erratic twinges of stifled emotions.

“Your perusal of the ground floor erred on the slow side, contrasting too greatly with your abrupt entrance from the stairwell for one pace to have naturally led to the other. Upon your ascent, a thought presented itself to you which you had not considered—nor even presumed to consider—prior to coming here, which I noted by your appearance upon opening the door.”

Marcus suppresses a wince and studies the gray and white threads intermingling on his scarf. He wraps it once around his neck and automatically opens his hand for the thermos aimed for his knuckles. The smooth outside feels warm against his fingers. An experimental sip spreads heat down his throat and across his chest like a splash of sunlight breaking through storm clouds. He sighs around the taste of hot chocolate on his tongue.

“You were worried that I may have relapsed.”

“We don’t really talk about that part of your life,” Marcus tells the lip of the thermos, breathing in its sweet, warm exhalations.

“Apart from the increasingly nonsensical cryptograms you’ve been sending me via text since the missing zebras were safely returned to the zoo, no, we do not, not really.”

Marcus manages not to frown but silently directs a resentful thought toward his cellphone. If technology had reached a point of sentience by now, maybe it could have talked him out of sending those—or at least out of sending so many of them with the help of an online generator.

Despite the chagrin he’s battling now, he can’t fully regret it. It was fun trying to stump Sherlock Holmes and using the time it took him to decode the messages as a means of guessing how busy he was. He hadn’t thought it was inappropriate. He hopes it hasn’t been construed as such. Of all the people in Marcus’ life at present, he’s sure he’s not the only one of Holmes’ friends who can claim that Sherlock’s is the most unique, as well as the hardest, relationship to explain.

Holmes is the one who screams back when the moment for confrontation and hard truths presents itself. He’s the one who doesn’t push Marcus to feel ‘good’ or ‘happy’ or ‘better’ before he’s ready to feel it naturally. He’s the one who brings Marcus in to act as an idea board on his days off because he anticipates Marcus’ unrest and knows to cite _that_ as his main reason for bringing him in as a temporary partner.

Because it sounds more like the truth, Marcus says, “We talk.”

And rather than contradict him, even though it goes directly against what he’s just said, Holmes replies, “I suppose.”

“So you called me Detective because you could tell all that from how I got up here?”

“The use of first names can be a gesture of intimacy, especially between individuals unused to the custom.” Holmes waves his hand between them. “We have only just established that I will address you by name and not ‘Detective Bell’. Experience dictates that in stressful situations, chords of intimacy can diffuse tension by way of creating an entirely different breed of it.”

Marcus licks his lips, not understanding. A few seconds later he thinks he does understand.

He clears his throat, speaking too loud when he asks: “So if I _had_ broken in, you wouldn’t have been the least bit concerned?”

“You came to your senses,” Holmes answers brightly, taking a sip from his own thermos as nonchalantly as if they had been having this discussion all along. “Besides, we’ve all broken and entered at one time or another in our line of work.”

“You’re a bad influence.”

In a sage, almost distracted voice, he says, “I’m a student and a teacher of many crafts.”

“Yeah, you make sure none of us forget it.”

“Well, I did invite you here, so. I wager that does nothing to weaken your claim that I am, as you say, a bad influence.”

“It really doesn’t,” Marcus replies, smiling at the gloomy almost-scowl on Holmes’ face. 

The thermos steadily bleeds heat into his hands and the scarf keeps his chest and neck warm, but as Holmes is contemplating his riposte, a curt shiver twists up Marcus’ spine. In two moments’ time, Holmes is on his feet and working at the buttons on his coat. Marcus stands reflexively and then decisively, shaking his head and holding up his hands. He fumbles for a moment with his thermos and sets it down, catching Holmes’ wrists to stop him halfway through the process.

“I got legs, don’t I? I’ll go downstairs and get my coat. Shouldn’t have come up here without it in the first place.”

Beneath his hands, Holmes goes very still.

Marcus releases him but doesn’t step back. He thinks to apologize but doesn’t. The coat hangs partially open about midway through the torso. Holmes doesn’t move to button it back up.

“You left it behind out of a sense of urgency for my wellbeing.”

Only for not knowing how to tactfully, succinctly apologize for leaping to that conclusion, Marcus doesn’t have an immediate reply. Holmes doesn’t seem to need one. Softly, as if Marcus’ speechlessness is a point of encouragement for him, he says, “Allow me now to consider your comfort over my own.”

Marcus takes a sweeping glance around at the rooftop when Holmes goes back to unbuttoning. He angles his body away at the sound of fabric rustling and stiffens at the soft brush of fabric touching his arm and then sweeping around his back, caught on the other side of him in Holmes’ other hand. Not for the first time, Marcus clocks their height difference. Holmes barely looks at him. As soon as the coat’s on his shoulders and swallowing him with the aid of gravity, Holmes is returning pleasantly to his seat.

They watch the hive. After many long, stalled seconds, Marcus sits. He sips more of the hot chocolate and raises his eyes lazily to the sky, darkened to a resolute black punctured through by constellations.

“Watson is moving back in.”

“Oh?”

He’d heard from the guys keeping watch at her apartment that she was in the works of having her things packed up. They hadn’t asked and she hadn’t told him, so he kept his questions to himself in a similar fashion. He’d planned on asking when he came back to work. He thought that might make the inquiry more his business if she still hadn’t decided to tell him on her own.

“She expressed a desire to continue our partnership. Our arrangement serves her best if she’s focused on the work we do.”

“Does this mean you won’t be dragging me along for cases anymore?” Marcus asks, not bothering to mask whatever conflicted feelings he has about that possibility.

Holmes gazes at the beehive and works his thumb repetitively over his forefinger. Marcus shrugs minutely beneath the coat swamping his shoulders and pulls the halves closed over his front without fastening them together.

“Haven’t you been looking for a roommate since Kitty left?”

Hesitating, Holmes says, “Yes.”

Marcus thinks about a coffee cup laced with Hemlock and a quiet conversation held in the captain’s office that Marcus wasn’t invited to. He didn’t need to be to know what was involved.

“Guess this isn’t how you wanted it to happen.”

A different kind of pause settles between them. Holmes fidgets with his fingers and leans to one side to take something up from the ground. He straightens, shakes out a neatly folded blanket, and drapes it over his front. Marcus stares at him.

“Wouldn’t it have made more sense to give me the blanket and keep your coat for yourself?”

“Would it have?”

Marcus opens his mouth, closes it, and shakes his head with a slow drink of cooling hot chocolate. He has half a mind to tell Holmes that his coat smells of spices and vaguely like honey, but he can hear even without saying it that it wouldn’t sound like a complaint.

He buries a sigh and sets his thermos down, adjusting the set of his scarf and crossing his arms after a fashion.

“Why’d you ask me to come over anyway?”

Holmes shifts slightly under his blanket and glances from the hive to the dark sky overhead.

“By my estimation, you’re still on vacation.”

“Yeah, but last time you called, you had a client. Now we’re on the roof drinking hot chocolate, staring at bees.”

_And I’m wearing your coat._

“I thought you would be free.”

Waiting for more, Marcus says, “Okay.”

Holmes pushes a sigh out through his nose and wrestles briefly with the blanket so that it piles in his lap, freeing his arms for the nervous energy in his hands and fingers. When he finds the sequence of words he wants, he manages to sound irritated and resigned at the same time.

“Watson refused my offer to help her move, and Captain Gregson is currently working a rather tedious case of grand larceny. He’ll solve it by the week’s end unaided. It’s terribly dull.”

“So you…got bored, and lonely?”

“It’s Valentine’s Day,” Holmes blurts out, looking like he hates every single part of the declaration.

Marcus’ brain goes blank for a few seconds, and when he remembers that he should probably react in some way, his face is already going warm against his wishes. 

In a strange, too-high voice, he asks, “Is it?”

“Yes,” Holmes grumbles. “It is.”

Marcus nods at nothing and then laughs a bit helplessly. Holmes doesn’t laugh, but he does visibly relax from what Marcus can see out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t want to turn and look directly at him and risk spooking him. It’s pretty clear they’re playing whatever this is by ear—if it even _is_ anything in the first place.

He wonders if this would be happening if Marcus hadn’t told him to call him by name instead of ‘Detective Bell’. The littlest things could make the biggest changes.

Maybe things had been changing before tonight and Marcus had only just thought to notice.

“If you’d rather be elsewhere, I would understand,” Holmes says, haltingly, holding his hands rigidly together in his lap. “You consistently prove your competence in the field, and our last case together demonstrated to me that I enjoy your presence in moderation. It only seemed appropriate that I seek your company now. Perhaps you disagree.

“I can be abrasive. I certainly have been to you.” He shrugs his shoulders in one tiny, jerky motion like that one spark of energy wouldn’t concede to containment. “I did get you shot.”

“Holmes—”

“Am I still Holmes when you’ve decided that you’ll be Marcus to me?”

The soft quality of his voice, how it sounds like it would crumple at the touch if it were a physical thing to be touched, calls for silence. That thing Holmes said earlier about first names and intimacy washes over him again, and his neck and ears burn at the implication.

“You didn’t say it made you uncomfortable,” he tries.

“It doesn’t.”

Marcus nods and keeps his eyes trained toward the sky where the silhouetted rooftop contrasts with the darker, liquid black of nightfall.

“If I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t have come.”

They’re still and quiet for a few seconds more until, abruptly, Holmes decides to come out from under it. His hands break apart, one wrist planting itself on the thin arm of his chair and two fingers flicking at each other as if in some unspoken contest. The hot chocolate’s gone cold, but Marcus doesn’t need it to keep himself warm now.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Sherlock.”

He sees him smile out the corner of his eye and then fully when he turns to look at him. Holmes meets his eyes for a handful of seconds and then sinks back into his chair, returning his eyes to the hive before them.

“What do you know about the swarming habits of bees?” Holmes asks slowly, glancing briefly between Marcus and the beehive.

“Not as much as I’m about to.”

Holmes doesn’t disappoint. This time Marcus does tell him that his coat smells of honey, and the pleased look Holmes gets on his face is entirely worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from “Beeline Talkin’ Blues” by Metchosin


End file.
